The Devil and the Deep

Vasco admired her pluck. The girl, who he knew to be barely out of her teens, may well be staring him straight in the eye but he could smell her fear as only a veteran of a hundred raids on the high seas could.

Lord alone knew what had happened to her in the two days she’d been at the mercy of Juan Del Toro and his ruffians. But something told him this pampered English miss could certainly hold her own.

And virgins fetched a much higher price at the slave markets.

‘As you wish,’ he murmured again.

Mary narrowed her eyes, suspicious of his easy capitulation. ‘You know my uncle? You know who I am?’

He smiled at her. ‘You are Lady Mary Bingham. The bishop commissioned me to...retrieve you.’

For the first time in two days Mary could see an end to the nightmare that had begun with her abduction down by the wharfs a mere forty-eight hours before and she almost sagged to the damp floorboards at his feet. She’d heard her former captives talking about slave markets and had been scared witless.

Alas, falling at the feet of a pirate, whether sanctioned by her uncle or not, wasn’t something a young woman of good breeding did. ‘Thank you,’ she said politely. ‘I am most grateful for your speedy response. Juan Del Toro’s men do not know how to treat a lady.’

‘Do not thank me yet, Lady Bingham.’ He smiled with steel in his lips. ‘There are a lot of miles between here and Plymouth and by the end of it my men may well care less about you being a lady and more about you being a woman.’

Mary raised a haughty eyebrow, hoping it disguised the sudden leap in her pulse. ‘And you would allow such fiendish behaviour amongst your crew?’

Vasco smiled his most charming smile, his dark tousled hair giving him the look of the devil. ‘Amongst my crew? Of course not, Lady Bingham. But captains do enjoy certain privileges...’

STELLA MILLS sighed as she closed down the document on her desktop and dragged herself back from the swashbuckling seventeen hundreds to the reality of the here and now. She could re-read the words that had flowed effortlessly out of her last year and made her an ‘overnight’ sensation until the cows came home but it didn’t change the facts—one book did not a writer make.

One book did not a career make.

No matter how many publishing houses had bid for Pleasure Hunt at auction, no matter how many best-seller lists it had made or how many fan letters she’d received or how much money competing film companies had thrown at her for the film rights.

No matter how crazy the romance world had gone for Vasco Ramirez.

They wanted more.

And so did the publisher.

Stella stared at the blinking cursor on the blank page in front of her. The same blinking cursor she’d been staring at for almost a year now.

Oh, God. ‘I’m a one-hit wonder,’ she groaned as her head hit the keyboard.

A knock on the door interrupted her pity party and she glanced up. Several lines of gobbledygook stared back at her as the knock came again. She grimaced—it seemed she was destined to write nothing but incomprehensible garbage for ever more.

Another knock, more insistent than the last, demanded her attention. ‘Coming,’ she called as she did what she’d done every day for the past year—deleted the lot.

She hurried to the door and was reaching for the knob as a fourth knock landed. ‘Okay, okay, hold your horses,’ she said as she wrenched the damn thing open.

Piercing blue eyes, the exact colour of warm, tropical waters that fringed the reefs she knew he knew like the back of his hand, greeted her. She blinked. ‘Rick?’

‘Stel,’ he murmured, leaning forward to kiss first one cheek then the other, inhaling the familiar coconut essence of her.

She shut her eyes briefly as the smell of sea breezes and ocean salt infused her senses the way they always did whenever Riccardo Granville was close. When she opened them again Rick had withdrawn and her mother came into focus, hovering behind his shoulder. Her eyes were rimmed with red and she was biting on her bottom lip.

Her mother lived in London and Rick called the ocean his home. Why were they here? In Cornwall. Together?

Stella frowned as a feeling of doom descended.

‘What’s wrong?’ she asked, looking from one to the other as her pulse wooshed like a raging torrent through her ears.

Her mother stepped forward and hugged her. ‘Darling,’ she murmured, ‘it’s Nathan.’

Stella blinked. Her father?

She looked over her mother’s shoulder at Rick, his face grim. ‘Rick?’ she asked, searching for a spark of something—anything—that would bring her back from the precipice she was balanced upon.

Rick looked down at the woman he’d known almost all his thirty years and sadly shook his head. ‘I’m sorry.’

CHAPTER ONE

Six months later...

THE cursor still blinked at her from the same blank page. Although Stella rather fancied that it had given up blinking and had moved on to mocking.

There were no words. No story.

No characters spoke in her head. No plot played like a movie reel. No shards of glittering dialogue burnt brightly on her inward eye desperate for release.

There was just the same old silence.

And now grief to boot.

And Diana would be arriving soon.

As if she’d willed it, a knock on the door heralded Stella’s closest friend. Normally she’d have leapt from her seat to welcome Diana but not today. In fact, for a moment, she seriously considered not opening the door at all.

Today, Diana was not here as her friend.

Today, Diana was here as a representative from the publisher.

And she’d promised her chapter one...

‘I know you’re in there. Don’t make me break this sucker down.’

The voice was muffled but determined and Stella resigned herself to her fate as she crossed from her work area in the window alcove, with its spectacular one-eighty-degree views of rugged Cornish coastline, to the front door. She drew in a steadying breath as she unlatched it and pulled it open.

Diana opened her arms. ‘Babe,’ she muttered as she swept Stella into a rib-cracking hug. ‘How are you doing? I’ve been so worried about you.’

Stella settled into the sweet sisterhood of the embrace, suddenly so glad to see her friend she could feel tears prick at the backs of her eyes. They’d only known each other a handful of years since meeting at uni, but Diana had called most nights since the funeral and this was her tenth visit.

‘Pretty rubbish,’ she admitted into Diana’s shoulder.

‘Of course you are,’ Diana soothed, rubbing her friend’s back. ‘Your dad died—it comes with the territory.’